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Estonia (Estonian: Eesti [ˈeːsʲti] (listen)), officially the Republic of Estonia (Estonian: Eesti Vabariik), is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland with Finland on the other side, to the west by the Baltic Sea with Sweden on the other side, to the south by Latvia (343 km), and to the east by Lake Peipus and Russia (338.6 km). The territory of Estonia consists of a mainland and 2,222 islands in the Baltic Sea, covering a total area of 45,227 km2 (17,462 sq mi), water 2,839 km2 (1,096 sq mi), land area 42,388 km2 (16,366 sq mi), and is influenced by a humid continental climate. The official language of the country, Estonian, is the second most spoken Finnic language.

The territory of Estonia has been inhabited since at least 9,000 B.C. Ancient Estonians were some of the last European pagans to be Christianized, following the Livonian Crusade in the 13th century. After centuries of successive rule by Germans, Danes, Swedes, Poles and Russians, a distinct Estonian national identity began to emerge in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This culminated in independence from Russia in 1920 after a brief War of Independence at the end of World War I. Initially democratic, after the Great Depression Estonia was governed by authoritarian rule since 1934 during the Era of Silence. During World War II (1939–1945), Estonia was repeatedly contested and occupied by the Soviet Union and Germany, ultimately being incorporated into the former as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. After the loss of its de facto independence, Estonia's de jure state continuity was preserved by diplomatic representatives and the government-in-exile. In 1987 the peaceful Singing Revolution began against Soviet rule, resulting in the restoration of de facto independence on 20 August 1991.

The sovereign state of Estonia is a democratic unitary parliamentary republic divided into fifteen counties. Its capital and largest city is Tallinn. With a population of 1.3 million, it is one of the least-populous member states of the European Union since joining in 2004, the economic monetary Eurozone, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Schengen Area, and of the Western military alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is a developed country with an advanced, high-income economy that has been among the fastest-growing in the EU. Estonia ranks very high in the Human Development Index, and performs favourably in measurements of economic freedom, civil liberties, education, and press freedom (third in the world in 2012 and 2007). Estonian citizens are provided with universal health care, free education, and the longest-paid maternity leave in the OECD. One of the world's most digitally advanced societies, in 2005 Estonia became the first state to hold elections over the Internet, and in 2014 the first state to provide e-residency.

Janus Friis ([ˈjæːnus ˈfʁiːˀs]; born 26 June 1976) is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application Kazaa, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype. In September 2005, he and his partner Niklas Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6B. Friis has maintained ownership interest in Skype through Silver Lake Partners, which sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, in May 2011.Friis and Zennström also developed Joost - an interactive software application for distributing TV shows and other forms of video content over the Web. The assets of this service were sold to Adconion Media Group in November 2009. Independently, Friis founded video streaming startup Vdio in 2011.Friis and Ahti Heinla founded Starship Technologies in 2014, to develop small self-driving delivery robots.

Let's do it 2008 (Estonian: Teeme ära 2008) is the largest campaign to activate civic society in Estonia since the Singing Revolution in 1988. Let's Do It! World is a global campaign for cleaning all countries that grew out of Let's do it 2008.

Over 50,000 people, or approximately 4% of the population of 1.3 million, participated in the cleanup of the forests and countryside, which would be proportionally equal to 15.3 million people in the United States, or 57 million people in India. Momentum for the event was built up with a media campaign from October 2007 to April 2008. The action was carried out during one day on 3 May 2008. More than 10,000 tons of garbage were removed from the country's forest in about 5 hours for less than 500,000 euros. Under normal circumstances it would have taken the government 3 years and 22.5 million euros to accomplish a similar feat.

A music tracker (short version tracker) is a type of music sequencer software for creating music. The music is represented as discrete musical notes positioned in several channels at discrete chronological positions on a vertical timeline.

A music tracker's user interface is usually number based. Notes, parameter changes, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal digits.

Separate patterns have independent timelines; a complete song consists of a master list of repeated patterns.

Later trackers departed from solely using module files, adding other options both to the sound synthesis (hosting generic synthesizers and effects or MIDI output) and to the sequencing (MIDI input and recording), effectively becoming general purpose sequencers with a different user interface.

Music trackers like DefleMask and FamiTracker are commonly used to create chiptunes.

Priit Kasesalu (born 10 April 1972) is an Estonian programmer and software developer best known for his participation in the development of Kazaa, Skype and, most recently, Joost. He currently works for Ambient Sound Investments and lives in Tallinn, Estonia.

Skype () is a telecommunications application software product that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches via the Internet and to regular telephones. Skype additionally provides instant messaging services. Users may transmit both text and video messages, and may exchange digital documents such as images, text, and video. Skype allows video conference calls.

Skype implements a freemium business model. Much of the service is free, but Skype Credit or a subscription is required to call a landline or a mobile phone number. At the end of 2010, there were over 660 million worldwide users, with over 300 million estimated active each month as of August 2015. At one point in February 2012, there were 34 million users concurrently online on Skype.First released in August 2003, Skype was created by the Swede Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis, in cooperation with Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, Estonians who developed the backend that was also used in the music-sharing application Kazaa. In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion. In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Skype division headquarters are in Luxembourg, but most of the development team and 44% of all the division's employees are still situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.Skype allows users to communicate over the Internet by voice, using a microphone, by video using a webcam, and by instant messaging. Skype-to-Skype calls to other users are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones (over traditional telephone networks) are charged via a debit-based user account system called Skype Credit. Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home, and education networks, citing such reasons as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage and security concerns.Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. Skype has been powered entirely by Microsoft-operated supernodes since May 2012. The 2013 mass surveillance disclosures revealed that Microsoft had granted intelligence agencies unfettered access to supernodes and Skype communication content.Throughout 2016 and 2017, Microsoft redesigned its Skype clients in a way that transitioned Skype from peer-to-peer service to a centralized Azure service and adjusted the user interfaces of apps to make text-based messaging more prominent than voice calling. Skype for Windows, iOS, Android, Mac and Linux received significant, visible overhauls.

Skype Technologies S.A.R.L (also known as Skype Software S.A.R.L, Skype Communications S.A.R.L, Skype Inc., and Skype Limited) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg and Palo Alto, CA, United States, whose chief business is the manufacturing and marketing of the video chat and instant messaging computer software program Skype, and various Internet telephony services associated with it. Microsoft purchased the company in 2011, and it has since then operated as their wholly owned subsidiary; as of 2016, it is operating as part of Microsoft's Office Product Group. The company is a Société à responsabilité limitée, or SARL, equivalent to an American limited liability company.

Skype, a voice over IP (VoIP) service, was first released in 2003 as a way to make free computer-to-computer calls, or reduced-rate calls from a computer to telephones. Support for paid services such as calling landline/mobile phones from Skype (formerly called SkypeOut), allowing landline/mobile phones to call Skype (formerly called SkypeIn and now Skype Number), and voice messaging generates the majority of Skype's revenue.

eBay acquired Skype Technologies S.A. in September 2005 and in April 2009 announced plans to spin it off in a 2010 Initial Public Offering (IPO). In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, valuing the business at $2.75 billion. Skype was acquired by Microsoft in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.

As of 2010, Skype was available in 27 languages and has 660 million worldwide users, an average of over 100 million active each month, and has faced challenges to its intellectual property amid political concerns by governments wishing to control telecommunications systems within their borders.

Starship Technologies is a company developing small self-driving robotic delivery vehicles (unmanned ground vehicles). The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia. "Starship Technologies, Inc." was incorporated in Delaware, USA, on 3 December 2015, with a registered corporate address in Sherman Oaks, CA.

Weekdone is an internal communication service for teams founded in 2012 that is based in Tartu, Estonia. It enables the OKR goal-setting and Progress, plans, problems weekly reporting methodologies.

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